Little Wins is a cross-platform game and application design, development, and deployment studio. We keep our message simple, big ideas grow from lil’ wins. Our process, principles, and execution revolve around breaking down scopes and winning the details. Read more about our background, our games, or play along in [story mode].

Since March 2014, I’ve worked with Flyclops on their game, Domino!, supporting a player-base of 3M downloads on iOS and Android, 500k monthly actives, and 150k daily players. Together we’ve tackled purchasing, realtime gameplay, game integrity, player experience, and process. Below is a piece I produced that highlights the team and features behind our 2.0 release.

Soulfill is a mobile-assisted live action role-playing game to secretly play while waiting for the subway. Built exclusively on iOS using accessibility features, the game has no graphics, only audio and gestures. To play Soulfill, you listen to narrator prompts on your iPhone while waiting or riding public transportation. You score points by initiating and maintaining eye contact with strangers. Be careful, you lose points by making eye contact with those already looking at you. The game challenges players to progress past the awkwardness of initiating eye contact with strangers in a setting where social contact presents a certain level of danger. Inevitably the game uncovers the fact that these fears are self-imposed, and that those around us in this same threatening setting have the same fears.

Working alongside the design agency Bluecadet, I launched an iPad game teaching chemistry for the Chemistry Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. Together we researched over 100 different chemical reactions and recreated each using particle systems in Unity3D. The result is a engaging and authentic experience for all players interested in chemistry.

Update: Among other honors and distinctions, ChemCrafter has received a 2015 Webby Award.

On May 28th, I spoke on a panel about my experience moving from full-time to freelance. Hosted by AIGA Philadelphia and moderated by Geekadelphia’s Editor in Chief Mikey Ilagan. I was joined by fellow-freelancers Steve Decusatis and Saul Rosenbaum, who was one of the first people I met starting out my journey in Philadelphia almost 15 years ago. Thanks to Nick Prestileo for the invite and Josh Carter for the fantastic recording.

If you are thinking about freelancing, give this a listen. There are a lot of years of experience captured in this hour-long broadcast.

The Moment I Saw Your Eyes, our submission to Philly Dev Night August Game Jam. The theme, develop a game inspired by a song title from the band Oasis. We chose “The Moment I Saw Your Eyes” and made a fast-paced 4-player competitive shooter for MacOS. After 3 days of development we realized the song was a barbershop quartet entry in the 2011 Sweet Adelines International Quartet Contest, Semi-Final Round. Undeterred by Spotify’s lack of differentiation with the quartet’s British counterparts, we pressed on. The goal of the game, hunt down your opponents and look them in the eyes, first to look shoots the other player. Or better put, the Moment I Saw Your Eyes, I Died.

For those of you who write tech blogs, we salute you. Without you, we wouldn’t know our bitcoins from our bitmaps. When we set out to cover all the tech that we’ve been pushing lately, like core data in enterprise applications and continuous integration with Jenkins and component-based architecture in Unity, we blanked. The words wouldn’t come to us. Then we stalled. Hard stalled. The kind of epic stalling you only come across in 3-year-old first-born sons learning to potty train. And then we wrote a story about 3-year-old first-born sons forming a big wheel gang dressed in full larping regalia unleashing every fire hydrant in the city, dropping the water table well below what’s necessary to keep the toilets flushing properly. And while that story will remain under wraps until we find complimentary stock photography, we started writing another story that we think might tickle some fancies. We’ll post as we write, and sometimes we might go back and rewrite. So without further ado (and this has been some serious ado’ing), we present @lilwins’ first foray into self-published creative writing, the story of Antares.